


The Width of a Circle

by equestrianstatue



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 18:58:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8545321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/equestrianstatue/pseuds/equestrianstatue
Summary: I’m never getting inside of that head again.
Between 1963 and 1973, Erik and Charles almost definitely have no contact at all.





	

When Charles comes to him, Erik has been beneath the Pentagon for three days, much of it heavily sedated.  
  
_Erik_ , says Charles, clear as a bell through the groggy morass of his mind. _Erik, it’s me._  
  
Erik is lying on the thin bedroll against one wall of the cell. He presses the heels of his hands against his closed eyes. _Go away, Charles._  
  
_My God. What have you done?_  
  
Erik doesn’t answer. He assumes, anyway, that this is a rhetorical question. Charles’s presence in his mind is at once deeply familiar and deeply jarring. An itch in his skull, in his back teeth.  
  
He opens his eyes, blinking away the patterns of light and dark that form where he has pushed into his sockets. _Concrete_ , he hears from Charles, as the cell comes into view. _Glass. Well, yes._  
  
“Forgive me, but I’m not in the mood for visitors,” says Erik, out loud.  
  
Charles ignores him. _Erik, how could you do something like this?_  
  
“Like what? Imprison a man without trial?”  
  
_Don’t you see that you are causing people to be afraid of you? And that if you cause people to be afraid of you, they will lock you away?_  
  
“On the contrary. They will always be afraid of us. They will always lock us away. What I do has no bearing on the matter.”  
  
Erik can feel Charles’s sanctimony, his pity, and his disappointment. He does not wish for any of them. He closes his eyes again, blocking Charles’s view of his small colourless world, but Charles still says, _I’m truly sorry to see you here, my friend._  
  
“I think we are both well aware that I am not your friend.”  
  
Charles does not respond to that. But he stays where he is, sitting quietly in Erik’s head, saying nothing.  
  
After a moment Erik sits upright on his bedroll, opens his eyes again, and stares hard at the blank wall in front of him. With enough concentration, and without Charles’s resistance, he can see something like an image of Charles there, a faint projection. Telepathy is a two-way street; Charles had taught him that. Erik is out of practice and the image is not particularly clear, but it is enough for him to make out Charles’s face. Charles looks rather unhappy and very tired. Then he senses what Erik has done, and looks him in the eye, or at least he appears to do so.  
  
“How is Raven?” says Charles. “Is she safe?”  
  
Erik does not want to think about Raven: about the promises he made to her, about remaking the world by her side, about how angry and alone he has left her. He does not want to think of her in bed, beautiful and quite blue, her hand splayed across his chest, holding him still with no visible effort. After a moment, irritated, he sends this image to Charles, who winces in displeasure.  
  
“Erik,” he says, nonetheless, “Please. Do you know where she is?”  
  
“No,” says Erik. But then he admits, “She wasn’t in Dallas. And she knows how to look after herself.”  
  
Charles nods, slowly.  
  
Erik is starting to be able to put together a little more of the picture around Charles, bringing it into focus. No Cerebro, of course. He must have worked hard to reach Erik without it. Although presumably he knows exactly where Erik is, which must help. Two of Charles’s fingers rest in their customary position against his temple, and his other hand rests on the arm of the chair he is sitting in. The chair is a wheelchair. A cold, sickening guilt wells up inside Erik, so strong and shocking that it almost chokes him. He tugs it back inside himself before Charles has a chance to feel it.  
  
But Charles knows, at least, that Erik has seen the chair. He looks down at it in a way that is almost self-deprecating. “Yes,” he says. “I’m just about used to it now.”  
  
Erik closes his eyes again, but the image remains faintly visible. He knew already, of course, what had become of Charles, and yet somehow he feels caught unawares. Erik has very many causes of guilt to his name, and this is by no means the greatest of them, yet what he is feeling now is quite unbalancing in its enormity. He wants to swallow the senstion, dissolve it in his own stomach acid, remove it entirely from himself. But this is not possible. What he can do instead is bury it, carefully and deliberately, deep in the recesses of his mind. And, like every other time he has done this, a simmering anger floods in to take its place.  
  
He is quite furious with Charles: for having survived when so many others have not; for choosing to compromise on the fight that is necessary to protect their kind; and for refusing to blame Erik for what he has done to him. Or, at least, he refuses to show Erik that he blames him. Only a measured disappointment radiates from Charles now. He ought to be furious with Erik too. Appropriate rage is imperative for survival, for Erik’s survival, for the survival of their race, and Charles rejects it again and again. His complacency upsets Erik tremendously, and he wants only to remove it from him.  
  
“You deserved it,” Erik says. “I should have finished the job.”  
  
For a moment Charles is silent. Then he says, “I know you don’t mean that.”  
  
“Do not presume to tell me what I mean. You know very well what I am.”  
  
Erik advances a step towards Charles’s image, even though he is not there. He throws at Charles, like a weapon, a memory of himself slitting a man’s throat in Austria: the precise sound of the body hitting the floor, the satisfaction of the handle of the knife landing back in the palm of his hand. Charles flinches, visibly. Another: two men shot at point-blank range, one of them crying for his children before he died. A man stabbed through the hand and then in the gut, a slow, awful death. A man strangled with his own silver-tipped shoelaces.  
  
“Stop,” says Charles. “Stop. Enough.”  
  
Erik is almost against the wall now, staring straight into Charles’s face, or where it pretends to be.  
  
“You are weak,” he says. “If we are to survive, we must be prepared to fight. You will not. And until you do, you are as good as one of them. You might as well be signing our death warrants yourself. Raven, Angel, all of us.”  
  
For a moment, there is nothing. Then Erik feels, at long last, a wave of anger from Charles: it breaks over him, hard enough for him to feel it in his chest, his solar plexus. Erik revels in it. He grins, laughs, manic and open-mouthed, bangs the flat of his hand hard against the thick wall, and then his forehead against it too.  
  
“How does it feel, Charles?” he asks, his eyes closed, panting. Charles does not reply. Eventually Erik realises this is because he has left him. 

*

To some extent, Erik is prepared for the period of his life that he spends in his five-walled cell. He has significant experience of incarceration, after all, including prolonged solitary confinement.  
  
To begin with, he is questioned daily. He refuses to speak. The men who visit him come armed with batons of reinforced plastic, but rather to Erik’s surprise, they do not assault him, despite his non-compliance. He realises then that they are afraid of him. Even though they know he cannot reach an ounce of metal with which to defend himself, they do not dare to touch him. Erik welcomes their fear. They have identified that he is something more than them, and they are quite right to be afraid.  
  
As the days and weeks pass, this deadlock prevails. The questioning becomes less frequent. Erik refuses to co-operate, but the people holding him here have already achieved their primary goal: his neutralisation. And so, gradually, he begins to be left alone. Occasionally men in suits are escorted to view him, through the glass ceiling, as a dangerous caged animal.  
  
He prolongs his physical health and his sanity as best he can. He walks endlessly around the small circuit of his walls, maintains an exercise regimen, plays mental chess, recalls and reassembles full passages from long-ago-read books. He is angry, lonely and carries a deep sense of injustice, but in an almost dispassionate way which causes minimal impact on his day-to-day life.  
  
He sleeps often and for long stretches of time. His dreams are complex and in-depth, sometimes entirely fantastical, but often simply reconstructed memories of his freedom. Shaw, Charles, Raven and his mother recur frequently, often in places and memories in which they have no right to appear. But increasingly, even his dreams are of confinement: sometimes that of his childhood, but often involving imaginary visitors to the cell in which he really sleeps.  
  
Raven sits cross-legged at the foot of his bedroll: sometimes she cries, sometimes she tells him coolly that she is glad to be rid of him. Hank turns up now and again to rail against Erik in terms that the real Hank would never permit himself to use, which Erik actually rather enjoys. Occasionally Shaw hangs crucified in the air, and more occasionally other dead men and women stand quietly, not asking questions, simply watching him. If he tries to speak to them, they do not reply.  
  
For some time whenever Charles appears it is always in that infernal chair, but perhaps Erik’s mind takes pity on itself, and soon Charles begins to look more as Erik remembers him from the summer they met. Erik uses him in this form to exercise his mind, not his emotional capacity: they debate questions of ethics and history, and only sometimes does this devolve into out-and-out argument.  
  
It starts to become more difficult to distinguish between sleeping and waking, between reality and illusion. Erik supposes the total blankness of his existence desperately requires some invented stimulus. Sometimes he wakes up to find himself quite outside of his body, asleep on the other side of the cell; sometimes, most tantalisingly, he is looking down through the glass ceiling, on the other side of the barrier between himself and the rest of the world. Sometimes the walls appear to shift around him, or to cover themselves with writing, in languages that change as he tries to focus on the words. And still he talks to the living, to the dead, and to the guards who deliver his plastic-packaged food – although he cannot always tell whether or not he is speaking out loud, so whether the guards hear him is another matter.

*

At first, Erik manages to keep an internal tally of time, there being no implement with which to mark it anywhere in his cell. The end of each day is signalled by six hours of darkness, during which he is presumably supposed to sleep, but he in fact sleeps equally well during the hours of bright white light.  
  
Somewhere around the three-year mark, he realises that he can no longer be absolutely and assuredly certain of the number of days, weeks and months he has passed in his cell. He struggles with this for a while, and then, exhausted by the torment, simply stops counting. So he does not know when it is that he has an unusual dream of Charles.  
  
Erik is, to the best of his knowledge, asleep. He becomes gradually aware of a sensation in his breast, a hot, throbbing ache that he takes at first to be a physical ailment. But before long he recognises it simply as a misery so deep as to be almost debilitating. It is as familiar as pulling on old clothes. Erik lets it ebb through him, filling the empty vessel that his mind and body have lately become.  
  
It is only then that Erik becomes aware of Charles, in amongst the weight of what he is feeling. Charles is its centre of gravity, inhabiting Erik more fully than he has ever done before. It is as if he is not just in Erik’s mind, but somehow within his heart, his blood, his skin.  
  
_Erik?_  
  
_Erik, my God, is that you?_  
  
Charles is not a physical apparition, which is not unusual in itself. Of course it is natural that Erik sometimes imagines Charles only as a voice in his head. But Charles sounds nothing like he usually does. There is none of the unerring optimism and self-righteousness that Erik usually imbues him with, and not even the tired disappointment that accompanies his visits in the wheelchair. He sounds quite wretched.  
  
_Oh, my friend, I am so sorry. I am so very sorry. I don’t know what to do._  
  
Erik stares at the emptiness above his head, lying quite still. The emotion he is being forced to experience is paralysing in its intensity.  
  
_Do you hear me? You shouldn’t be able to hear me. Oh, Erik. Nobody deserves this._  
  
Whether nobody deserves Erik’s imprisonment or Charles’s unhappiness is not clear. But after this there are no more words, only a continuing sense of regret and apology. It takes some hours for this to fade, and for Erik to feel once again that he is alone.  
  
Erik is unsettled by this dream for some hours more. How dare Charles feel anything so awful, so crushing as that despair – Charles, with his means, with his health (well – enough of it), with his freedom? Or, more to the point, why should some part of Erik’s subconscious decide that this is how Charles ought to feel? 

* 

Erik never has another dream quite like this. But there is another conversation that he later dwells on as having been out of the ordinary. It is again difficult to say with any certainty when this might have taken place.  
  
It is another occasion on which he does not imagine Charles as a visible apparition, or even initially as a voice in his head. But for some time Erik is aware that Charles is present. He does not know how long he lies motionless, eyes closed, knowing that he is not alone.  
  
Then, in a distant sort of way, he hears Charles’s voice at last: _Either I’ve missed a dose, or this is a dream._  
  
_A dose of what?_ Erik answers.  
  
_Erik. Oh, it is good to hear your voice._  
  
_Is it?_  
  
_I have missed you very terribly_ , says Charles.  
  
In all the weeks, months, years, of their imaginary communion, Charles has never actually said this before. Erik does not immediately have a response.  
  
_I don’t blame myself for what has happened to you_ , Charles continues. _But I do wonder if I could have stopped it from happening. I wonder if I could have stopped you from making it happen._  
  
_I doubt it._ Erik thinks of the helmet, of the cold, calm sensation of being entirely cut off from Charles.  
  
_That’s not what I meant. I never wanted to control you._  
  
Erik is, he thinks, awake now. His eyes are open, and he tucks his hands behind his head as he looks up at the thick plates of glass above him. Out loud, he says, “Didn’t you?”  
  
_Of course not. I don’t want to control anyone._  
  
“Yes, you do. If you saw that I was about to hurt somebody, you would stop me if you could, wouldn’t you? You would hold me still.”  
  
_Only as a last resort._  
  
“That’s exactly what your mutation is for. Control.”  
  
_Knowledge. Empathy._  
  
“Power.”  
  
_I don’t want to argue_ , says Charles.  
  
“That’s a first.”  
  
Charles is exasperated, but not angry. Erik can hear it in his tone, but he also experiences it, at a remove. It feels familiar, or at least Charles feels that it is familiar, in an almost enjoyable way. Charles may not have liked to fight, but he liked to argue, and he also liked to win. Erik can see – or imagine, or remember – the irritated raise of Charles’s eyebrows, the quirk of his mouth into something that is partly a grimace and partly a smile. Erik got the sense back then that Charles had become rather used to not being challenged, and that the regularity with which Erik did so appalled and delighted him in equal measure.  
  
The memory solidifies a little: that very expression on Charles as he stands with his hands on his hips in a grey sweatshirt and matching jogging bottoms, pink-skinned from a run with Hank in the grounds. In the memory, Erik wears the same outfit. How reasonable that seemed at the time: a uniform, a banding together.  
  
Charles asks him, _Were you happy there, Erik?_  
  
Erik is not sure that he knows the answer to this. Certainly he recalls the time he spent in Westchester with a broken sort of nostalgia; certainly he was grateful for the training, for the companionship, for the unexpected and unqualified welcome he received into Charles’s home. But when Charles uses the word _happy_ , Erik can feel reverberations of something deep and primal and unrecognisable. It carries a sense of wholehearted contentment, of an almost spiritual wellbeing, that Erik thinks he might not actually be capable of comprehending, let alone possessing.  
  
“I was not unhappy,” he says.  
  
_Well_ , says Charles _. Good. I was not unhappy either._  
  
Erik closes his eyes. He can see the gardens of Charles’s house, and the woodland beyond the gardens. Acres of land. He remembers this view from a back window on the top floor of the house, and as he takes it in, he sees a distant figure moving among the expanse of greenery, walking alone at the edge of the woods. As the figure comes closer to the house, he can make out the ubiquitous grey sweats, and then some of the features. He realises that the figure is himself. The memory, the eyes he is looking through, the hands in front of him leaning on the windowsill, are Charles’s.  
  
_It was difficult to tell, with you_ , Charles says.  
  
_You’re a telepath, Charles._  
  
_It was still difficult._  
  
Erik tries to put himself back in that autumn, in that house, to see if he can identify a memory in which he is unquestionably happy. He thinks of standing with his eyes closed in the middle of what was once a dining room, now cleared and rigged as a gym. Charles, Alex and Hank are ranged around the room, throwing knives and forks raided from the Xavier family silverware towards him. Every slim piece of metal is a bright pinprick of light in his consciousness. He stops them as they hurtle through the air, sending some rattling to the floor, keeping some hovering in defence against Alex’s particularly well-aimed steak knives. He feels an exhilaration, a fierce joy, at the flexing of his power, knowing that he is only scratching at its surface. Then, again, he sees himself from the outside. His body is perfectly still, his face impassive, as the metal whirls around him. He feels Charles’s exact combination of intellectual interest and simple pleasure at witnessing the precision of his control.  
  
Other memories settle around him, around both of them, like softly-falling leaves on the forest floor. They intertwine, overlay each other, until it is no longer quite clear which of them is remembering what. Raven laughing at the breakfast table; Sean’s sickening, triumphant swoop of first flight; brandy in Charles’s study, sitting in comfortable silence for hours on end. Although of course there was no such thing as silence with Charles. There was always a hum of activity, the soft presence of him at the edges of Erik’s consciousness, even when they were not having a mental conversation. He sees Charles’s smile over the chessboard as Erik takes another pawn; his own answering expression, eyebrows raised; the two memories intermingled. Charles in Erik’s lap, knuckles white as he grips the leather arms of the chair, panting in short sharp gasps as Erik holds his hips tight and fucks him.  
  
Erik, rather taken aback, opens his eyes. “That didn’t happen.”  
  
(Although then he thinks, fleetingly: did it? Charles could wipe his mind clean in a blink of an eye. Could have done every day, if he’d wanted to.)  
  
_No_ , says Charles. He sounds almost wistful when he adds, _It could have done, though, couldn’t it?_  
  
Erik is not so much shocked by the image – although he is shocked by it, by the fact that it might live inside Charles’s or both of their heads with such immediacy and vividness – as by Charles’s unusual candour. He says, “I don’t know.”  
  
_Really? Did you never consider it?_  
  
“Well, you would know, wouldn’t you?”  
  
_Not necessarily_ , says Charles. A hint of his occasional primness returns, which under the circumstances is almost funny. _Unless there is good reason, I try not to see or listen to anything that is… obviously personal._  
  
“Very noble. I don’t believe that for a moment.”  
  
_It was true in your case, anyhow._  
  
Erik has a brief flash of the bridge in the gardens of the mansion, the vast satellite looming behind them. The unprecedented and overwhelming release of emotion as Charles crept for the first time into his innermost core, sifted through the brightest and most fragile of his memories. He does not know which of them has conjured up this image now.  
  
_Only ever with your permission_ , says Charles. _You know that._  
  
“Am I giving you permission now?”  
  
_I’m not looking at anything personal now._  
  
Charles turning away and walking back into the CIA compound, infuriatingly convinced that Erik will not leave him. Charles’s arm slung loosely around Erik’s shoulders in a bar in Philadelphia; Charles fast asleep in a motel bed, blanket pushed down almost to his waist. The strange intimacy of hearing Charles’s voice in his head, so much like a low, private murmur in his ear. The particular tang of the metal on Charles’s body, his watch and his belt buckle and even the change in his pockets, so familiar that Erik begins to be able to taste it in the air when he is nearby.  
  
_Looking at all that?_ he asks.  
  
_Yes_ , Charles admits.  
  
_Well. It doesn’t matter now, anyway, does it?_  
  
_Everything about you matters to me._  
  
Charles has a knack for making this sort of statement quite naturally, as if this isn’t a claim of such enormity that Erik is left somewhat stranded by it. It is the sort of thing that people say but cannot possibly really mean. But Charles does know everything about Erik, and still he says it.  
  
Erik takes a moment to let all of this settle upon him. He does not really feel able to respond. But eventually he lets out a truth that is buried somewhere in the remains of his self-knowledge, and says, “I miss you very much, Charles.” The words sound strange and thin as they bounce off the whitewashed concrete.  
  
He feels Charles’s reaction to this inside his own body: sorrow, an aching sympathy, some satisfaction. After a moment, Charles replies, not spitefully, _Good._  
  
For a while there is nothing more. Then, although it is not formed in words, Erik becomes aware of the suggestion that he should close his eyes once more and roll over onto his side. It is not a compulsion, just a request, but he has no reason not to follow it, so he does.  
  
It takes a few moments to manifest, but then Erik realises he can sense Charles lying behind him, beside him, on the ground. He also knows that Charles is not there, and yet everything in his body tells him that he is. The back of his neck prickles, and the air is heavy with another person’s breathing. Still Charles does not say anything, but there is the imperative that Erik must not turn over, must not look, so as not to break the thread of concentration that makes this illusion possible.  
  
Erik feels a calm he has not known in many years. He thinks that even his heartbeat slows, and that Charles’s slows with it. If Charles tipped his head forward, his forehead would press against the gap between Erik’s shoulderblades. They do not move. But they stay like this for a very long time, existing together, until at last Erik either falls asleep or wakes up.

**Author's Note:**

> If you liked this story, you can reblog it [on tumblr](https://justlikeeddie.tumblr.com/post/153130369712/the-width-of-a-circle-equestrianstatue-x-men)!


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